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NSA Surveillance: the Implications for Civil Liberties

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NSA Surveillance: the Implications for Civil Liberties NSA Surveillance: The Implications for Civil Liberties SHAYANA KADIDAL* What are the implications for civil liberties of the massive surveillance programs that have come to public attention as a result of Edward Snowden's disclosures? The first challenge for anyone attempting to unravel this issue is the natural tendency of the public to shrug' at the volume and complexity of the information flooding out 11 from both Snowden and other official sources that have started to speak to the media under the cover of his disclosures. The stories are rapidly evolving, and frankly, complex enough to confuse anyone. But in my view, the greatest contributor to the apparent complexity is the maze of ever-shifting, always highly technical legal justifications for the various programs at issue. In what follows, I will argue that the actual surveillance taking place is remarkably consistent from the Bush administration to the present day; although the legal rationales for the surveillance programs are protean, the programs themselves- and therefore their implications for civil liberties-are largely consistent. It is therefore both more enlightening (and simpler) to start a few years in the past, when most of us first heard about the National Security Agency (NSA), in late 2005 when James Risen and Eric Lichtblau of the New York Times broke the story2 that the NSA was collecting large quantities of calls and emails without getting * Senior Managing Attorney, Center for Constitutional Rights, New York City; J.D., Yale, 1994. The views expressed herein are not those of the author's employer, nor, if later proven incorrect, of the author. 1In internet terms, "TL;DR.". 2 James Risen & Eric Lichtblau, Bush Lets US Spy on Callers without Courts, N.Y. TJMES (Dec. 16, 2005), http://www.nytimes.Com/2005/12/16/polities/i6program.html?pagewanted=all. I/S: A JOURNAL OF LAW AND POLICY [VOL. 10:2 approval from a court first, as usually happens with a conventional wiretap warrant. 1. 21 ST CENTURY SURVEILLANCE: A BRIEF HISTORY After holding the story for more than a year-past the 2004 presidential election-the Times finally published it in December 2005, shortly before Risen's book State of War (which included a chapter on the program) was scheduled for publication. Being the product of such a lengthy period of reporting, the story was rich in detail, but the main revelation was that the NSA, with presidential approval, has since shortly after 9/11 been intercepting calls and emails where one communicant was inside the U.S. and one abroad, where it believed that one of the parties was somehow affiliated with terrorism, all without any warrants or degree of judicial review whatsoever. The story was reported as an example of blatant lawlessness, for this "NSA Program" or "Program" (as I will call it throughout) appeared to circumvent the post-Watergate Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) that was designed to subject most foreign intelligence wiretapping to a system of judicial review similar to that that had applied to domestic wiretaps for criminal investigatory purposes since the 1968 Wiretap Act ("Title III"). Indeed, the Bush Administration, which chose to aggressively defend the Program in the media, admitted as much: surveillance under the Program was of the sort that ordinarily would have been subject to FISA.3 That 1978 FISA statute, by appearances, was quite permissive: If the government could provide to the specialized Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) evidence creating probable cause to suspect that a target was working for a foreign power (defined to include terrorist groups), it could get a FISA order-essentially, a wiretap warrant-allowing surveillance of that target's communications. In practice as well as in theory it seemed easy enough for the government to use: There were only five outright rejections among the first 22,987 applications after 1978. 4 Though the administration would argue that 3 See Petition for a Writ of Certiorari at 6, Center for Constitutional Rights v. Obama, No. 13-802 (Jan. 2, 2014), availableat http://ccrjustice.org/files/Center%2ofor%20Constitutional%2ORights%2Ov%20%20 ObamaPetition%2ofor%2oWrit.pdf. 4 See Petition for Certiorari, supra note 3, at 5; ForeignIntelligence SurveillanceAct Court Orders 1979-2012, Electronic Privacy Information Center (May 1, 2014), http://epic.org/privacy/wiretap/stats/fisa-stats.html. It does appear that the process before the FISC occasionally results in modifications of the initial applications; this occurred in roughly 2% of the applications submitted in 2012, for instance. Id. 2014] KADIDAL judicial approval stood in the way of "speed and agility" in tracking down targets,' like Title III the original 1978 FISA provided for retroactive judicial approval in the event of emergencies. And in any event, the administration never asked a rather pliant Congress for approval of changes to the FISA statute, instead proceeding by executive fiat. The political shockwaves the story generated were largely a consequence of this gross illegality; indeed the administration's spin seemed to project pride in its willingness to break the law, which added to the unease in my own community of civil libertarian litigators. Why not use FISA if the statute was that easy to work with? Our main suspicion at the time was that the administration was trying to eavesdrop on communications that even a very compliant FISC judge would not approve of intercepting: conversations between lawyers and their clients, journalists and their sources. The description of the program-international calls and emails, with one end in the U.S., where one party was suspected (by an NSA staffer, not necessarily based on any tangible evidence) of association with terrorism-fit a vast quantity of our legally-privileged communications. The Center for Constitutional Rights's (CCR) legal staff frequently calls or emails released Guantanamo detainees, their families, or witnesses relevant to their cases, or other overseas lawyers and experts. We also represented torture rendition victim Maher Arar, who lived in Canada at the time of the disclosures, having been released after a year of torture in Syria at the behest of our government, and representatives of a class of immigration detainees unfairly labeled as of interest to the 9/11 investigation, subject to over- long detention under brutal conditions, and subsequently deported overseas. They were all potential targets of the program, and though we need to communicate with them, we felt we had to take costly and burdensome countermeasures (such as traveling overseas to meet in person rather than using the phone) given the existence of this judicially-unsupervised program of surveillance (which by definition did not operate under any judicially-supervised minimization procedures that might otherwise protect plaintiffs' legally privileged communications6 ). We felt the costs created by those counter- measures, the concrete manifestations of the chilling effect cast by the NSA Program, were sufficient to create injury-in-fact for standing 5 Press Release, The White House, Setting the Record Straight: Critics Launch Attacks Against Program to Detect and Prevent Terrorist Attacks (Jan. 4, 2oo6), availableat https://www.fas.org/irp/news/2006/ol/wholo4o6.html. 6 On minimization of legally-privileged communications, see infranote 98 and accompanying text. I/S: A JOURNAL OF LAW AND POLICY [V01. 10:2 purposes, so CCR brought suit seeking to enjoin the Program;7 the ACLU brought a similar suit (on behalf of itself, other lawyers, and journalists) on the same day in January 2oo6.8 However, there were clues even then that this targeted NSA Program was only one aspect of the NSA's expanded post-9/11 surveillance activities. Risen and Lichtblau's initial story-and later others-reported, based on inside NSA sources, that there was a "data mining" component to the program-meaning, essentially, that the NSA was intercepting electronic communications (calls and emails) in a general fashion, not a targeted one, and then either scanning the content of those communications for the presence of certain keywords thought to be themselves suspicious, or applying more complex algorithms to that huge database to flag communications or the parties thereto for further scrutiny. To use a simple example of the latter, suppose a call comes in to a U.S. number from Afghanistan in the middle of the night, and the person called then calls five other people within an hour. A mechanical algorithm can easily identify such situations (even where there was no prior reason to suspect any of the persons on the calls) and flag them for further review. The pattern the algorithm identifies may be characteristic of sleeper cells triggered to action; it may also be characteristic of a family wedding announcement being passed along to close relatives. Within short order, a case was filed seeking damages against AT&T based on what appeared to be its complicity in just such a massive data-mining operation against its own customers. 9 An AT&T employee whistleblower, Mark Klein, had disclosed to attorneys at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) the existence of a secret room in AT&T's Folsom St., San Francisco switching station. It appeared that a copy of every electronic communication coming in off the fiber optic undersea cables that entered AT&T's domestic system through the Folsom St. station was being sent off to the NSA through the equipment installed in the secret room; the only people who would enter the room were NSA staffers and one AT&T employee who held the highest security clearance. The complaint in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's case, Hepting v. AT&T, also alleged that AT&T had turned over its vast call records database to the government too- 7 CCR v. Obama, CENTER FOR CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS (2013), http://ccrjusfice.org/CCR- v-Obama.
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